Use Podcast in teaching

I chose this Podcast from the website ESL Pod: English Cafe 498

I really like the podcast, in the following ways:

1. Speech speed: The podcaster speaks very slowly and clearly, perfect for English learners, especially for intermediate level students.

2. Content: The podcast clip I listened to consists of two parts, an introduction to a movie and an introduction to a website Craigslist. The two parts are totally relevant to students’ lives and fully cultural embedded. Students would learn so much from them.

3. Vocabulary and explanations: The podcaster would stress on new words, spell them and then give simple explanations and the contexts they could be used. This is the highlight of the podcast, which connects the podcast to my future teaching.

I would ask my students to subscribe the podcast. They can listen to the podcast whenever or wherever they feel comfortable. I want them to make notes when listening to the podcast. They should be writing down notes as such:

1. New words. Spell them correctly, simply explain them in one or two sentences and give one or two sample sentences where they can be used. Students don't have to write down all the new words they have heard in one podcast, but they should at least have five new words.

Objective: Students learn new words or expressions in contexts.

2. Summarize the content of one podcast. What does the podcaster mainly talk about? For example, for the podcast I heard, the podcaster talked about Craigslist. Then I would write something that I have learned about Craigslist. For example, it is a website for people to get or post information about apartment hunting or second-hand things. It now charges people a certain amount of fees, even though it was free before… The writing doesn't have to include all the things the podcaster said. Several sentences would do.

Objective: Students learn cultural facts about the United States.

3. Students keep notes and write short paragraphs in their journals. I will look into their journals once or twice a month, or everyone just shares their journals in class.

Objective: Students keep journals to accumulate knowledge and practice their oral English when sharing with classmates their journals.

Dvolver

My Dvolver comic strip: Let's go shopping

The comic strip creation for this week's mod is consistent with the photo story on Animoto. For the photo story, students should focus on the vocab and expressions that could be used in an social interaction, such as shopping. For the comic strip, students should make up a relatively social conversation with characters, plot, lines and social purposes. In real classrooms, the comic strip can be used to follow the photo story, and they both are part of one bigger module or theme. Therefore, the language performance indicator for the photo story and the comic strip should be the same.

Performance indicator - ESL.1.5-8.4.1.9 
Students use appropriate vocabulary, expressions, language, routines, and interaction styles for various audiences and formal and informal social or school situations, noticing how intention is realized through language.
May Include - ESL.1.5-8.4.1.9.MI
Expressions and routines such as asking permission, making and responding to request, greeting, making promises, thanking and apologizing. Such situations include chatting with friends, participating in group discussions, greeting a principal or other adult, and making purchases.

Assessment:
Students work in pairs or groups and make comic strips together, following the rubric that the teacher creates. Pairs or groups make presentations about their comic strips to the class, followed by several questions they design for the class to answer. Through the questions, the presenters assess how much the class understands their comic strips and the teacher assess how well the presenters could perform in the social interactions they set.

Animoto Video

My Animoto Video: Let's go shopping!
Background music: Pet Shop Boys, Shopping
Source of all photos: Google images

For this week's mod, I created an Animoto video with pictures and texts. It is in the setting of a social interaction: students learn words and expressions which could be used in shopping scenarios. Students may create their own photo stories with the Animoto videos. Language performance indicators and assessment are as follows:

Performance indicator - ESL.1.5-8.4.1.9 
Students use appropriate vocabulary, expressions, language, routines, and interaction styles for various audiences and formal and informal social or school situations, noticing how intention is realized through language.
May Include - ESL.1.5-8.4.1.9.MI
Expressions and routines such as asking permission, making and responding to request, greeting, making promises, thanking and apologizing. Such situations include chatting with friends, participating in group discussions, greeting a principal or other adult, and making purchases.

Assessment: 
1. I would create a rubric for students to follow before they create their own photo stories. The rubric can also be used as an assessment tool for me to identify students' strengths and weakness in their language performances. For example, the rubric may state that the photo story is set in a social interaction, involving an appropriate social conversation, or part of an appropriate social conversation. Students' followings to the rubric may be demonstrated in their choices of social settings and conversations, so they can be assessed.
2. Students may work in pairs or groups to finish photo stories together. All members shall receive the same score for one group.
3. Students may make presentations to the class, followed by a small quiz to the class. From the presentations and quizzes that students design, their use of language for social interaction purposes can be assessed.

My First TED Lesson & Reflections

Behold! My first Ted Lesson:)
William Shakespeare: Mini Biography

Objectives	Assessments
Students should be able to --Identify some basic facts about Shakespeare: including his personal information, experiences, as well as historical and cultural roles and so on.	In-classroom assessment: --Students answer multiple-choice questions correctly after self-study at home and in-class group discussion; --Each group indicates evidences of their choices in the video, and the teacher goes around the classroom and takes notes on how many correct evidences they can find in the video.
--Name some of his great works and identify in which periods they were finished	In-classroom Assessment: --Students answer the second question correctly in the lesson. After-class Assessment: --Students organize a given list of some of Shakespeare’s great works in a chronicle order, early, middle and later periods.
--Mainly understand how Shakespeare influenced the development of English language and literature	In-classroom Assessment: --Students discuss Shakespeare’s influences on English Language in groups, and the teacher go around the classroom, observe and assess individually. The group comes up with a list of the influences and share with the class. The teacher grades the list for each group. After-class Assessment: --Students post responses to discussion board online. One response should be at least two paragraphs, describing explicitly on one of Shakespeare’s main legacies on English language. The teacher should design a rubric for students to refer to.

Reflections on flipping a class:

1. I was concerned about how to make flipped classes aligned over a period of time. After creating a lesson myself, I changed my mind. I think flipped classes are not to be adopted for a whole semester or a certain period. They can be an integral part of a complete course. For example, in one course, there can be two or three flipped classes involved, with materials echoing the knowledge being taught at that time in a course. If we should try to make the entire course a flipped style, it would be extremely hard for teachers to find materials from the internet which are consistent and sequential in syllabus.

2. I was concerned about the quality of teaching materials for students to work on at home. My concern is solved now, since I have tried TED-Ed and realized that it can be used as a format or a rubric itself to make sure the teaching materials wouldn't fail to meet the demands for effective teaching outcomes. I am not saying that TED-Ed is the ultimate answer, but it is a good start to build up my confidence in solving the problem with the help of technologies.

3. I was concerned about the lack of supervision over students at home. With specific assessments in-classroom and after-class, the concern is gone. We can never supervise our students all the time, right? We should give them credits and give them the power, the power of learning and the power of self-regulating. Online learning is still not popular in China not because families can’t afford computers but because parents don't believe that their kids would use computers to study instead of playing games. If I keep thinking about how to control rather than how to trust, I would never be a good teacher. I was wrong, and I have learned from my own lesson.

Flipping your class

To flip a class is like to shuffle the order of teaching a course. The traditional order: the teacher teaches in class, students go back home and do homework and the teacher assesses students’ understandings and skills from students’ assignments and classroom performances. However, the flipped class order puts the homework-doing part ahead of the in-classroom teaching. The problem would be: how could students be able to finish the assignments before the teacher even teaches them the knowledge? The key point here is that the teacher must prepare students with sufficient and effective teaching materials for students to learn from at home. Therefore, the order of a flipped class is: students work at home (with teaching materials and home assignments), students work with peers and the teacher in class, and students continue to work after class. (references: Flipping Your EL Classroom: A Primer and Three Reasons to Flip Your Classroom

I haven’t flipped a class yet. But here are some concerns of mine:

1. How can we as teachers make sure that materials (video, audio and texts) we create for students to work at home before class are guiding them in the right way? Unlike teaching in class when we can see students’ responses while teaching, teaching a flipped class may cause extra time and energy at students’ costs if they couldn't make the most use of the materials if the materials are not designed to-the-point. The students may spend lots of time trying to figure out something on their own, only to find that they are thinking in the wrong way when they are communicating with the teacher in class. It is possible because for some knowledge, it could be hard to be explained in materials rather than teacher’s in-person instruction. Flipping a class relies hugely on the quality of materials given by the teacher, yet the materials are hard to be designed and aligned through a period of time.

2. Since students work on their own at home, it is hard for the teacher to supervise the process. If in a large class, it is hard for the teacher to assess the learning outcome of each student in class. If a student doesn't study at home and the teacher fails to assess that in class, the teacher would lose the control of tracking the learning of the student. How can we make sure that all students would go through all materials and study on their own at home?

3. How does the teacher assess the outcomes of students’ learning at home in class observations and after-class assignments?

4. Time is a big concern, too. The teacher may have to commit a lot of time to preparing the materials, not only keeping in mind the learning habits of his/her students but also taking into account the different proficiency levels of the students. Is there a rubric for designing materials for a flipped class?  

I hope I can answer these questions after I have flipped a lesion myself with TED. 

Toronto 2015

April, 2015, Toronto. With dresses and high heels in my suitcase, I had to wear the long jacket during my entire stay in the city which was boldly colder than Buffalo. You thought it would be a perfect season for some lady look...but NO! You were being naive.

For three days, we had to run quickly between two buildings which were connected by a long bridge and eight escalators. The schedule for the convention was so tight that there was only 15 minutes for us to shuttle between sessions. I felt like a journalist, trying to dig as deep as I could in the shortest period of time. Computer, iPad, iPhone, notepad... I used everything that I could fit into my backpack to record, take notes and make the most of the session time.

The convention was impressive in two ways. First, at the speech by the end of the Master Students' Forum, some student asked Dr. Nieto how she managed to balance her life and work, she said that she didn't have a personal life to balance with. She didn't like night clubs or parties, and she worked like a dog. I suddenly realized that for all the days I had been struggling, I wasted my time by neglecting one simple truth: we choose our own life, and the result will always be "win some and lose some". I had been going back and forth on whether I should go on and spend another 4 or 5 years in academia, and I had so many concerns, family, money and friends. I tried to find the best path to solve all problems once and for all. But it was not the way that life was supposed to be. Life is like, make the choice and take all the consequences. If I really want to do something, I should be strong enough to take all the shadow parts of it. During the convention, I saw so many scholars enjoying every session: it was their choice for life. Maybe they had their own problems back home, but at the convention, they made everything worth it. We don't have to balance; we just need to make the choice and take everything that comes along with it.

The convention taught me a lot for my professional development. Equally importantly, I learned a lot from the academic sessions. There were so many sessions everyday, and we got to choose whichever interested us personally. I was attracted to sessions concerning writing and technology. I was extremely amazed by how technology was being used in writing teaching, like MOOC and some other tools that teachers introduced, e.g. Crocodoc. They were both eye-opening tools. Writing is being taught to students in a totally new way. Teachers and students are interacting with a variety of online tools and making writing a fun job. Teachers may find technology extremely helpful in giving feedback and even pre and after writing. I am totally confident that I may be able to establish my own online writing center some day.

Teaching is becoming not only a career but also a life to me. I am really glad that I made the decision. I will move ahead until the day when students don't need me any more. Toronto is my starting point.

Good night, Toronto. Tomorrow is gonna be great!

Mission US, A Game that Blows My Mind!

I never thought that history could be taught this way! I can still remember how we used to bury our heads in history textbooks memorizing who did what in which year. This was how we studied history. To be honest, I don't remember much about the textbooks now.

Mission US is a game, but it is much more serious than any textbooks about history that I have ever read. The reason is that it is not about bulky books trying to cram students with facts but about stories that would happen to an ordinary person in a certain historical and cultural context. It is truly amazing!

I played the game twice, each time for an hour. I tried two missions, one in the context of 1770 and one in 1848. Through two animated teenagers’ roles, I got to live their lives in history, talked to different people, learned about the world back then and relived the key moments in history. Each role is set in a different identity in a different era in history. Players would play as these teenagers, experience their lives, finish their tasks and more importantly, learn about society in history during the process.

(see how the roles are culturally diversified!)

To me, the game is more meaningful in cultural education than linguistic education. To be honest, I myself have many words that I have no clues what the meanings are in a certain history context. So I would be concerned that the words in the games are extremely demanding to L2 learners, maybe except for college students who major in English language and literature. If asked to learn every detail of the stories, hidden historical facts and social status, students would lose the interests due to the totally demanding culture-embedded texts. However, it doesn't mean we can’t use it in language teaching.

I would use it as an extensive cultural class. Here are what my objectives would be:

1. For each mission, students should be able to summarize the main social classes and conflicts in the historical contexts, different parties and their different interests.

2. For each mission, students should be able to identify the key features of the specific era in American history and why it is so important in history.

3. For each mission, students should be able to understand at least 10 new words that are embedded with cultural meanings.

4. For each mission, students should be able to identify reasons for why choosing some answers over others to at least 5 interactions with different roles.

(These objectives are constructed by myself, but I did refer to Kyle Mawer's task types)

How to assess if students have achieved these goals?

For objectives 1 and 2, I would have students write short essays to respond to a series of prompts I have designed for them, mainly on historical significance and social conflicts in a certain period. For objective 3 and 4, I would pick up some conversations from the plot and go through them with students. During the process, I can access them orally. Since the contents are mostly about conversations, the dialogic communication of the game is quite helpful. However, the communication is achieved by oral expressions from the roles in the game and the multiple choice questions for the students. I would have students to perform the conversations in real life, so that they can also produce outputs, and meanwhile, I could assess whether they have made the right choices and what their understandings are towards the different choices.

Language performance indicators: ESL.C.9-12.5.1.2

Students demonstrate an understanding of a broad range of US cultural and political referents through institutions, functions and processes at the local and national levels, and compare/contrast these with parallels in the student’ native community.

Escape games

I tried an Escape game, which you may find here. I personally love Escape games. I used to play such games for hours on iPad. But the games I played were in Chinese, so I never realized how they could be connected to language learning and teaching. 

I have played the game twice, each time for around one hour. Here are some features of the game that I summarized :

1. Finding clues. The clues are the most important information the player should get to finally "escape" from the room. Clues are spread out across several rooms, sometimes hidden somewhere or sometimes logically connected (the player has to decode one before he/she can go on and decode another). 

2. Making sense of the clues. Clues are, most of the time, seemingly irrelevant to each other. The play must find the links between clues so that they can make sense of the clues. For example, to get one piece of puzzle, the player must break a balloon to get the piece of paper. How to break a balloon? The player may think about finding something with a sharp end. The only thing that is sharp in the room is the thumb-pin. So the player may go and click on the pin. Otherwise, the player wouldn't be aware of clicking on the pins. 

3. Finding the code to the lock and get out of there. After collecting all clues and making sense of them, the player would be able to find the ultimate information, the code to the lock, so that he/she may get out of there. The player will have a huge sense of achievement after he/she hears the opening of the door. 

How can we connect these features to language teaching and learning? What surprises me is that the instructions given in the game are a lot like the ones in Chinese, simple and communicative. Here I would analyze the language in the escape games in the following ways: 

1. Reading is the essential part of the game. No opportunity to speak or write anything. Players have to understand all the clues before they can win the games. 

2. To go deeper in reading, we can see that the texts include many indicators on lexical, syntactic and sometimes pragmatic levels. When players click on the image of a chair, if there is no clue there, it would simply say "it is a chair". If there is some clue, it may say "Check if there is anything else there". Sometimes, the system would post things like, "I already have one" or "A balloon!Yeah!" Information as such may not have direct clues, but players may infer from such messages and get other clues. 

3. The language used in the games is communicative, or dialogic. Players are not just following orders or instructions. They can establish a context with the system language. It is what I believe the most important language feature of escape games. 

Teacher's role: The teacher would play the role of the system language, giving clues and establishing a contextualized conversation with students so that they may learn things while trying to escaping from the rooms. 

Students' involvement: I strongly believe that escape games would be a huge magnet to students. Students, especially teenagers, love playing the detective roles to tell others how smart they are. They will surely get involved. However, to win the games, they have to understand all clues in English, so such games are challenging on both detective level and language proficiency level. So they must motivate themselves to learn. 

How to use it in classroom: I would use it as a peer game. Students can get into pairs and play it together. Students' different knowledge base may enhance each other. They can use dictionaries, but they can't go right to the walkthrough. The Teacher may have a pilot game with the entire class using a computer and projector first. The Teacher shall go around the classroom and inspire pairs who get stuck in the game. The game can't be played by images. Students must have access to computers. So I think the games can only be used in lab classes. 

How to use the walkthrough: It is the trickiest part. Follow the walkthrough, and all problems would be solved in one second. The teacher shall not use it in class. Actually, the main goal of playing the game is not to win it but to help students learn language during the process. After going back and forth looking for clues, students may have already learned a lot. The walkthrough may be given to them by the end of the class so that they can check by themselves. 

Language performance indicators: ESL 1.5-8.1.1.2.
Students read, gather, view, listen to, organize, discuss, interpret and analyze information related to academic content areas and various sources.  

Gamification in language learning

Gamification is new to me. To be honest, I never used it in one class, or across a semester. I mean, we do use class activities to practice or to assess students' learning outcomes, but we never used a "game" in one single class or even for a longitudinal period of time. What is a game? What are the differences of between a game and an activity? 

To find what a game is, I think we should first define what Game Mechanics is. In an article by Miguel Sicart, the author defines Game Mechanics as the "methods invoked by agents, designed for interaction with the game state."( see  Game Mechanics). In another article on digital games, the authors also highlighted five areas where the parallels between digital game deign and second language acquisition principles, which are goals, interaction, feedback, context and motivation. (see  Technology—“Just” Playing Games? A Look at the Use of Digital Games for Language Learning )

To me, the most important nature of games, which is also clarified in both definitions in the above articles, is "interactions". Social interactions are extremely important to the process of learning, according to Sociocultural Theories: we learn things through interacting with others through mediation. I believe the interactive nature of games makes the learning more effective, fun and motivated. On the other hand, class activities are not always interactive. 

Another feature of games I want to mention is "the flow". What is the flow? "The flow experience is one of the most universally euphoric experiences human beings enjoy. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines it as "the satisfying, exhilarating feeling of creative accomplishment and heightened functioning." (see Sculpting Flow and Fiero). The three factors proposed by Csikszentmihalyi are clear goals, rigidly defined rules of engagement and the potential for measured improvement in the context of those goals and rules. Therefore, in games, we want our students to be challenged in a context of rules to reach a certain goal, during which process, students learn things and the teacher assesses how much improvement students has accomplished. 

Moreover, since games are interactive, other interaction-relevant key concepts can not be ignored, such as feedback, agency and communication. Students may get feedback from their peers and the teacher in games and learn through the interaction. Each students are not just participating as individuals but as agents of their own backgrounds and cultures, so the teacher must be aware of the individuality of each student and explore how to get each student engaged in the most effective way. 

What comes to my mind about using games in language learning is that the teacher must clarify the goals and rules before the games. Since games are highly motivational as they are easy to make students distracted, to manage games in class context, especially the digital games, the teacher should make sure students understand why they are playing, what they are trying to learn and how to enhance the learning not only for themselves but also for others in class. 

Reconsidering what tweeting means to language learners

I was quite confident in my last post when I said it could be quite demanding and stressful for language learners to tweet in English, since twitter feed only allows 140 characters. But now, I am reconsidering my point. As a matter of fact, I realized that I was too negative about challenges. 

Chinese language is loose, scattered and flowing wherever thoughts go. I told my students to be concise and straightforward for millions of times when I was reviewing their essays. As a learner myself, it took me so many years to give up detouring in sentence writing and intentionally written long sentences (still trying). Maybe a limited space would be a new and better way for students to rethink their syntactic structure and reshape their writing. 

There is a famous metaphor about Chinese and English. Chinese is like grapes and English is like bamboo. Grapes expand to all directions in small units and bamboo goes straight from one section to another logically. Maybe twitter's linear text input space may reshape Chinese speakers' languaging process and improve their cognitive level of thinking in English. 

 

How to use Twitter in ESL teaching?

Although we can’t access to Twitter in China, we have a similar website, Weibo. It is like Chinese version of Twitter. Our reflections on Twitter can also be used on Weibo. I have compared the two websites, and they are practically the same to me. The only thing I have found different between them is the length of the tweet. On Twitter, each feed shall not exceed 140 characters. Although it is the same with Chinese characters on Weibo, if we convert the Chinese characters to English characters, we may find the English characters allowed on Weibo are more than those on Twitter. Please see the same feeds on Weibo and Twitter. I selected one feed from an English Weibo account, copied it and pasted it to my Twitter feed. We can see that the same feed on Twitter would exceed the limit by 95 characters. To English learners, it means something.

weibo

twitter

In one of my article reading, a blogger said: “‘Summing Up’ Ask students to read an article or chapter and then post their brief summary or précis of the key point(s). A limit of 140 characters demands a lot of academic discipline.” Teaching with Twitter

For native English speakers, 140 character limit is actually considered as a good way to train the skill of summarizing, but to English learners, it is highly demanding. Not so skillful with playing with words, English learners wouldn't be able to make the most of limited space with the minimum words. Tweeting in English could be really stressful to students. So Chinese Weibo, with larger feed space, might be good news to Chinese students who are learning English.

As I have stated in my previous blog, the most significant meaning of Twitter to me is to explore different communities online. By using Twitter/Weibo, we can establish a community for English learners with similar interests. Some educators extend the online activity to classroom activity, for example, Christine Morris explains how she experimented with the technology with her higher educated students, tapping into Tweetdeck to get the most out Twitter. Christine Morris

It was really inspiring that we as teachers could design a specially session for students to use the technology in class. We can lead students to use Twitter/Weibo outside the classroom in their spare times, we can also design a concentrate session. 

Personally, I may not use such sessions in language classrooms in China, since we have larger class sizes and it would be uncontrollable to manage such a class and unpractical to require all students bring their computers to class. However, I would have a workshop, open to all students who are interested in technology in language learning. At the workshop, I can inspire students how to use media and technologies in enhancing their language education by sharing different tools, practicing these tools in class with access to the Internet and having them share their own understandings of the E-learning. It would be interesting! 

Twitter chats

I had heard about Twitter years ago back in China, but since it is blocked in my home country, I never had an account. Shortly after I arrived in the United States, I created an account on Twitter. I posted two very simple tweets about homesick or something and then I stopped tweeting. The problem was that I didn't know whom to follow! Twitter is a highly contextualized environment with a high sense of identity and community. People tend to find their comfort zones, especially in a strange environment. As the speech on TED about Global Voice we have watched the other day shows, different ethnicity forms different community even on an open forum online, like Twitter. Since Twitter is blocked in China, I have very few friends who would use Twitter. Therefore, I couldn't find my own “community” on Twitter, so I stopped using it after a few days. Why wouldn't I follow whoever on Twitter to fit into the new community? I believe it would be a great idea to make new friends from other communities, but, as we all know, stepping out of the comfort zone is the hardest thing.

This week, our task for LAI 590 is to explore Twitter and how it can be used in language education. I revisited my Twitter account. This time, I had a clear goal: follow some educators on Twitter, learn from them about how to use Twitter and see what I can do with it. I participated in the Twitter chats #langchat. I typed in the #langchat in the search bubble and saw a stream of all tweeters’ feeds who had included #langchat in their feeds. I found some interesting tweets, such as foreign languages learning, teaching techniques and classroom sharing. I picked up some tweeters I liked and followed them. Now I am following almost 60 tweeters. Suddenly, my twitter account was alive! By following these people who share similar interests and pursuits with me, I have my new community. I posted a comment and a question with #langchat. Although no one has responded to me yet, I have three followers from the educators I have followed. I like it here. 

ePals

I love this website because it is a real learning community to me, involving teachers, students, schools and parents! Students are the center of the community. Activity Theory in sociocultural theories suggests the integral role of community in the learning process. Students learn through social interactions and develop themselves in the process. Community is what a student live in and conduct social interactions in, so when the community is recreated online, it is really helpful for students to learn. ePals has different classrooms that students may choose and it also has a special blogging space for students to interact with teachers and with each other, which I was excited to find out！
I am extremely excited to learn about the global community project of ePal! Students in different parts of world may get together in one classroom and learn from each other! This was a huge step forward for the real global voice and the concept of jumping from one flock another. I couldn't wait to introduce the website to my students. I wish one day I could establish a classroom there where my students may communicate with native English speakers who are interested in Chinese culture.

Google+ & Class 2.0

I tried two “community” websites, Google+ Communities and Classroom 2.0.

Google+ Communities is kind of handy, since I am already a Google+ user. I was recommended with many users I had contacted with, which was cool to see some familiar faces. I joined three communities, TED, ELLs and FLT. Members of communities may share texts, pictures, videos… everything with other members, and they can comment on others’ posts. Interactions are realized in comments. I also tried to establish a community myself and posed the first entry. The whole layout was clear and neat. The community can be public or private, which means you may get to decide who can be in your circles. I believe that it would be a wonderful place for interaction journal keeping between students and the teacher. Students may publish whatever they want to share, and the teacher would interact with them in comments. Dialogue journals are often used inn SCT, which I have always wanted to try. The biggest problem here is that Google is blocked for Chinese users, so my students wouldn't be able to use the tool. What a pity! 

Class 2.0 is a comprehensive forum community for participants. One may find everything there, forum, books, audio resources, projects, conferences... I believe it is a wonderful source for us teachers to exchange ideas with peers and learn from them. It is not a student-teacher interactive community, though. Unlike the interactions realized in comments on Google+, interactions on Class 2.0 are realized in traditional forum. Users follow each entry and interact with each other under one entry, one after another. Users may check on the poster's all discussions and follow her and add her to the contact. It is a traditional way of forum community, helpful for group discussions. I may find interesting sparkles in the discussions, but I will not use it as an interactive forum with my students. 

classroom 2.0

Watch out! Scary octopus is here!

photo from: http://pumml.deviantart.com/art/Giant-Octopus-Was-Very-Scary-175910124

Learners are like octopus monsters with long, soft and flexible tentacles. Although the octopuses in my analogy might be quite different from the real natural creatures. I imagine that the tentacles are hollow inside, open-ended for two-way communication, unlimited in quantity and can be any length so that they may reach anything in any distance. Every time a learner is exposed in an environment, he/she reaches to everything possible around and learns things from any source through their tentacles as well as influence other octopuses interacting with him/her.

Technology, or other cultural artifacts may facilitate the process by lengthening the tentacles to reach things far in the distance or space or improving the quality of tentacles’ two-way communication and influences. In the online lecture, the concept of connectivism identifies the learning process on three levels, biological, cognitive and social, all of which can be realized by the enhanced tentacles. As the knowledge information is increasing exponentially in today’s world, strengthened tentacles are the new way of learning.

The article is quite inspirational to me, since the fact that we are learning about learning shows the meta-function of learning. By reflecting on how we learn things, we may dig deeper into how we as teachers may provide what students need to learn. The author said that the traditional methods of studying the process of learning focus only on what happens inside learners; they “fail to address learning that occurs outside people.” Like tentacles, right? We need to examine more on how tentacles contact with tentacles from other learners and how they form a network from which all octopus can suck or share knowledge. The network is what the author refers to as the “small world”.

As I continue to think on my analogy, I would like to emphasize that the tentacles are not artifacts themselves (such as technologies) but integral parts of the body. Where are the technologies? I believe they are the power that enable the tentacles to get long, short, and straightforward or take a detour to another destination. They enhance the connection and make it as varied and full of possibilities. For example, if there were no internet, I would never have learned about the United States, and I would never have the opportunity of being here and writing this article. The technology magically lengthens my tentacles and create more sources for me to learn.

Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age by George Siemens

online lecture about connectivism

Happy Chinese New Year

2015 Chinese New Year Gala CCTV--Chinese Kungfu Show

Happy Chinese New Year, everyone! 

Diigo and Pinterest

my Pinterest link
my Diigo link

I like both tools, although in different ways.

Features they share are:

multiple tags;

reference to resources;

following others and being followed.

Diigo is an integrated resource organizer, and Pinterest is a casual notepad. Diigo has multiple functions that Pinterest doesn't have: upload PDF, read PDF files in an editable reader, set up a mini-blog where you may interact with your friends, link to websites and message with your friends. Another thing I like to mention about Diigo is  that it has a special feature of PDF reading and editing. It is quite useful for us who have to read so many articles. It would be wonderful if we could upload them and organize them with tags so that we might be able to find them more easily later.

Pinterest is like a notepad I keep random things. It is a fragmentized resource manager, which is quite useful in a way that we can keep the pieces of ideas, inspirations or information which would just slip away if we couldn't find a good place to net them.  Since I have a habit of keeping such information on notepads, I find it a good fit for me to pin things I like while reading or pin useful sharing from others. It is a different way of integrating information.

Technology makes it fun!

When I first watched the animation of Sir Ken Robinson’s speech on Changing Paradigms, I was so impressed! I just couldn't describe for you how my eyes were glued to the computer screen, staring at the “hand” in the video and learning as it interpreted the speech. My understanding of the speech was enhanced and my interest was intrigued. When it stopped after 12 minutes, I went straight on YouTube trying to find the complete version of the speech. I could see how the new way of inputting made a change to my learning experience. The animated version re-organized the original script, made it compact and clear for learning, and improved efficiency of idea-expressing through an inspiring way. I believe that the effect of driving students to search for sources and learn themselves are more important than teaching knowledge itself. The animation set a perfect example!  
animated Changing Paradigms 

original Changing Paradigms

Invisible doctrine: the nightmare we don’t know we had

Future Learning Documentary

Every time I think about doctrine, order, power and authority, I would naturally play the “China” card, since we all know what the country has been through, thousands of years’ (still ongoing) centralization which is deeply rooted in education as well. However, I am not going to reflect on culture and policy today. Instead, I will take a retrospect journey back to my own teaching today. Have I ever realized that the key words of Foreign Language Educations are not only language but also education? Have I secretly criticize some other teachers who would do things differently or whose English proficiency is questionable? Have I even felt lucky when I got away from students’ questioning? Have I refused to use technology in classroom since technology has never been my thing and it would be too challenging and troublesome for me to go through it?

Unfortunately, I would have to say that I didn't do such a good job being a teacher. There is “traditional” idea in China that those who have better language proficiency would be better teachers. That’s why I decided to teach in the first place—people around me encouraged me to do so, since they kept saying: “why don't you do it? You majored in English!” So I did it. Since I majored in English in college and I also have a Master’s Degree in translation studies, I assumed that I would do well in the profession. That is the first doctrine I followed that I didn't know. Now I realized that the assumption was invalid at all. It’s natural to believe that a person who can speak a totally different language would teach the ability to others and she or he would be a good teacher. But actually, it is not.

Teachers have the power in classroom in China. When students misbehave in classrooms, like playing cellphones or iPads, they would be punished for that. Seldom would teachers talk about what students are doing with their electronic devices, let alone that teachers would encourage students to learn using such devices. Teachers would follow their own teaching plans, which is much easier for them to do; they wouldn't even want to share the plans with other teachers. Like bosses in classrooms, teachers are teaching from a distance far from students. That is the second doctrine that I didn't know before.

Above all, the biggest doctrine I followed but I didn't know is that education is a job. If it is a job to me, I would take the road which would spare me of all the troubles or difficulties on my side. That is the why I didn't use technology much in classroom, since it is hard to me, and more importantly, I followed the invisible doctrines. I always tell my students to open their eyes, their hearts and free themselves from ideological shackles. But I didn't practice what I preached. The video woke me up from dreams in which I followed all these invisible doctrines. I want my students to be free, but before that I need to free myself. There is no personal excuses for teachers to adopt one method over another just because the latter is inconvenient or new to them. Teachers are humans with personal preferences or strengths for sure, but such personal preferences can never be the reasons why we can stay in our comfort zones, neglect what would benefit students better and follow our own doctrines. The new era of foreign language education should be focused on the word “education”, for example, how we can help students acquire language skills using a wide variety of tools instead of cramming them with what we know about the languages.  Teachers who can feed students with the best organized grammatical rules and tips for examinations are not good teachers to me. The real good ones are those who would lead students through the learning process. Therefore, I am no longer a follower of the doctrines I had: I don't believe that someone who have better English levels can teach better and I don't think teachers should involve too many personal preferences in education. Teaching is education, no matter what subject we teach. As long as it is about education, we need to fight against doctrines built inside ourselves before we can teach students to fight against their own doctrines.  

Two ways to use blogs in language education

I taught and will teach writing to students. So I mainly reflect on how to use blogs on writing classes. I don’t think we can use blogs too much IN a typical Chinese writing class which is too large to have students use blogs in a limited time-frame. We may use blogs in writing workshops which may also take place in classrooms yet are not considered as typical Chinese writing classes. I will talk about two ways I would use blogs with my students outside the physical classroom.

1. Blog is a forum. Students may post anything in English, for example, stories they like, poems they wrote, interesting news recently, their own feelings and confusions and so on. Others can comment and interact with the bloggers. It is like the way we are doing at LAI 590. I would suggest students to create things of their own not only to practice their writing skills but also to attract more comments. For example, students may keep diaries on their blogs, describe interesting photos they took and expressed their confusions about life. Since I think I will be teaching teenagers, I believe they have a lot of confusions to talk about.

2. Blog is a wiki. I may create a public blog for a workshop or a class. Students can write together. It is a cooperative writing blog. Students contribute a part of one task, mostly a story, individually. It could be fun. I always want to try that with Chinese students. I did it once with one student, but not on blog but on paper. We wrote a story together: at first it was an ordinary daily conversation between two girls, then it lost control and turned into a horror story. The twists were fun. I want to use a public blog as a big platform to involve more students on such tasks.

Performance indicators: Standard ESL.1.5-8.2

Students will listen, speak, read and write in English for literary response, enjoyment and expression. 

A New Start！

Blogs were widely used in China before Weibo (Chinese twitter) came in. People like Weibo because it doesn't require a long essay to express feelings and opinions; instead, it forces people to write short comments and easy sentences. Literacy now is acquired through fragmentized input and output. As a matter of fact, I personally was a blogger, but I am not anymore. I am jumping around Weibo, reposting some else’s articles and saying some quick stuff about my days.

When I set up this blog as required by the course, I suddenly realized that I have left blogs behind for too long! I am really excited to have things back to ways they used to be! I love writing and this is how I am going to reacquaint myself to writing and to connect myself to blog learning.